In consumer electronics, telecommunications, and industrial electronics, there are often many similarities between seemingly unrelated designs. For example, nearly every system includes some intelligent control such as a single integrated circuit (IC) microcontroller. Such systems may also include general-purpose circuits like liquid crystal display drivers, remote input/output ports, memory devices, or data converters, etc.
To exploit the similarity in system components and other characteristics to the benefit of both systems designers and equipment manufacturers, as well as to maximize hardware efficiency and circuit simplicity, a simple bi-directional two wire bus for efficient Inter-IC control was developed by Philips Semiconductors™ headquartered in Eindhoven, The Netherlands having operations throughout the world. The Inter-IC (I2C) bus is outlined in the I2C-Bus Specification, Version 2.1, January 2000, promulgated by Philips Semiconductors™, such specification being incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
The I2C Specification provides for the coupling of multiple devices including at least one master device and a number of slave devices to a two wire serial bus to facilitate serial data communications there between. A unique address is assigned to each slave device so that each slave device may be identified by the master device to facilitate serial communications therewith, etc. However, the number of devices that may be included on the serial bus is limited to the number of available addresses.